In 1977, in
Sequoia High School, in Redwood City California, I was 17, and
running my very first little campus club. The "Dungeons And
Dragons Society", as it was called, was in full swing, and
D&D fever was at its peak for us.

Now we played
in a little windowless extension room that at the time of this
incident, has about 30 people in it, so it was very packed, very
noisy, sweaty and rather warm. While there were many little games
going on, there was one really big adventure taking place in the
middle of the room, and one of the players was one of my one-day
spouses, Stephen.

I was
alternately sitting and standing, watching rather than participating
in this game, and back then the games were rather imaginative. The
game worlds that folks ran came in every variety, from high tech
science fiction to the usual pseudo medieval stuff, even the odd
western, modern day, or Jules Verne world. Very diverse. Better -or
worse, depending- the worlds were all considered open to each
other....so that characters shifted venues and universes from game to
game...taking with them their spoils. Some DM's were very
conservative, but others...well....handed out anything to anybody.

So, gamewise,
we have a quasi-medieval world with a cast of heroes from fantasy,
science fiction, and a modern day carwash, all questing after some
great dohangus or another, and many of the characters are of
diametrically opposing alignments. It was normal for our games to
include Chaotic Evil Lichs munging about with rather disgruntled
Paladins of Holiness in the same party, barely tolerating each other.
We felt it added 'spice' to the proceedings.

Which was all
well and good, until this one game I am speaking of, where one
character had managed to bring in a suitcase nuke from modern-day
Pakistan. Of course this was the Chaotic Neutral character in the
bunch, and the player made all his choices with dice, rather than sense.

So, when the
Magical Whangus was found, a fight naturally broke out concerning
ownership, doubtless due to the encouragement of a Futuristic Evil
Hobbit from our earth's future Moon or somesuch...and the Chaotic
Neutral character decided that the best way to bring peace and
resolve the battle was to press the shiny red button on the suitcase
nuke. Ka-blooey.

Now, gamers,
as you know, are ferociously attached to their characters, and nobody
liked this turn of events, so everyone was scrambling to impossibly
save their characters, somehow. All kinds of truly bizarre
efforts were argued, ferociously, from saving rolls to calling on
gods in the split second of vaporization to attempting to claim that
their character would just wake up in a shower next game, like on
Dallas. All were rejected, or failed their rolls, or were just
shouted down...the DM was one of those sticklers...you know the
kind...for 'realism'. Obviously everyone was dead, the end.

Now my
Stephen had his favorite character of all, Elo Mazad Kreen, a
mysterious High Wizardly type, and it was breaking his heart to just
loose his persona that way, so I decided to get clever. Real clever.
Fortunately, I study really obscure facts, as a hobby. I'm a nerd,
what more do you need to know?

When the
A-Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it 'blew up real good' as they say,
and turned the pretty city into a very flat field of radioactive
powder and rubble. Flat as a parking lot, flash prints of vaporized
children in fallen stone walls and sidewalks, all gone, good night.

Except.
Except for a handful of truly odd, truly mysterious things. A tree,
perfectly untouched, not even warmed by the blast, stood alone. A
handful of people who just happened to be in the perfect place at the
perfect moment to stand up untouched. Most of a building, right at
ground zero, still standing. Otherwise, flat and dead. Incredible,
but very true.

That was my
argument, and since it was historically accurate, it could not be
refuted. Elo Mazad Kreen had a chance (Stephen, probably in shock,
was the last to confront our fussy DM). I argued very
passionately...and finally screamed my way into the DM's heart. He
relented. A one-in-a-million-chance. Take it or leave it.

30 pairs of
eyes locked on the scene. Only the sound of dice rolling, and 30
people breathing low, but fast. The excitement was palpable, it could
be felt, like bubbles in the air.

Six 20-sided
dice were selected. Back then they were numbered 1-10 in one color,
and 1-10 in another color (actually 1-0...the 0 represented '10'),
and to be used as a D20, you would have to call one of the colors
'high' or 'low' to read the die. But they also served perfectly as a
superior D10, you could roll any number and just read the digits like
the odometer of a car. Six dice, one for each '10s' column in a final
number. To roll one in one million, Stephen (we always rolled out OWN
dice openly, to avoid 'hidden dice' conflicts) would have to roll a
zero on all six dice, in sequence....000000 One Million.

30 pairs of
eyes watched and 30 gamers held their breath as Stephen began to roll
the fourth sequential perfect '0'. no one dared exhale when he
succeeded. It was as if the collective will of 30 people was
wishing for only one thing in the whole world, that Stephen succeed.
Stephen was rolling not just for himself, but for the collective
pride of every slain character's player in that room....for every
arbitrarily slain character in every game, everywhere. Even our fussy
DM wanted Stephen to win, because that, THAT would be SOMETHING. Four
natural zeroes. Incredible!

The next D20
was rolled, the tension escalated to an unbelievable level as Stephen
-actually- rolled a zero! It was almost impossible to believe. But it
was happening, in front of us all, one more die to go.

As Stephen
lifted the sixth die, in a shaking hand, silently, I imagined that If
a pin had dropped, the room would have literally exploded and
destroyed the entire High School, the tension was so great. He
rolled. It was a zero.

The room DID
explode, not in violent force, but in deafening cheers. It was the
most amazing die roll I have ever seen in my long life. I offer no
explanations. It simply happened, and I am glad I got to be a
part of it.

The
Coolest Player In the World

In 1986, I
was 26, and we were living in, of all places, Pocatello Idaho. Houses
were cheap, and we had always wanted a house. This adventure did not
last long...Pocatello is not a very liberal place, and one of my
spouses is significantly less racially 'White' than the local
community of Pocatello liked to permit -living- people to be.

However, even
in this desert wasteland, lived a small number of outcasts, people
who, like yours truly, did things like gaming, instead of
Mormon-style Klan Rallies. One of these people, who played in my
gaming sessions, was the out of state guest of one of my
regulars...and the coolest player I have ever met.

The
adventuring party they collectively rolled up was very average (I had
learned to check what characters carried on them since High School),
all first level starters (for fun, it's neat to run a bunch of low
level characters and try to have cleverness make up for powers) had
insanely decided to go raid a local dragon cave, high in the
mountains of my game world. They crossed a river, by cutting trees
and working with ropes and cleverly using the lot...and Mr. Cool, as
I will call him, chose to "sit this one out".

The
adventures ran across some dangerous and oversized attacking
razorback boars, and fought for their very lives....Mr. Cool stayed
on the other side of the rocks, and decided to "Just watch, for now".

The party
faced a terrifying climb up sheer cliff walls, and used the pitons
and climbing equipment in town to make the ascent. A rope and wood
contrivance was cleverly fashioned to facilitate hauling treasure
back from the dragon cave. Mr. Cool used the device to easily haul
himself to the top, safely and in comfort. After it was all finished,
of course.

As they
approached the dragon caves, the players were mocking 'Mr. Cool'
because so far he had earned zero experience, and had accomplished
nothing at all. He was a waste of time, and though I kept trying to
encourage the quiet player to actually participate, he just chose to
"have a think on the rock outside the cave". Perhaps he was
just unimaginative, or afraid of making a silly choice, or maybe he
did not grasp what playing a Fantasy Role Play Game was all about?
Myself, I felt sorry for him. He never did a thing but have his
character just sit or watch.

The other
players decided on a full stealth assault, once they saw that the
dragon was asleep. The giant creature was snoring loudly (of course)
and was very, very asleep according to the dice. It would take
a bomb to wake it up. So the whole party, (except for Mr. Cool, of
course, who decided his character was taking a nap under a nearby
tree) got into position around the sleeping dragon. One would use a
sword through one of it's eyes, and try to hit the brain for an
instant kill. Another choose to go for the anus, looking to hit a
major artery for major damage. Others choose holes in the dragons
armor, one right over the heart, for a 'Lord Of The Rings' style
instant kill. On signal, they all plunged, hacked, cut, stabbed, and
pole-axed true.

Every last
one of the poor buggers either missed their dexterity roll, or failed
to hit anything of note, or fumbled. The screams of the doomed party
rang through the caves, as every single character was ripped,
shredded, or flamed into oblivion....except, of course, for Mr. Cool.

I asked Mr.
Cool what he was going to do, as all of the other players, prepared
to pack up their stuff and head home...obviously the game was over,
and Mr. Cool would just head back to town like a lump. I would just
give it to him, no need to play it out.

Mr. Cool
decided to get up and walk straight into the main opening of the
dragon's cave, the one with all of the charred armor smoking in
front. He held in his hand only one object, the ONLY object he owned,
the ONLY object his character had bought in town at the beginning of
the game. The players all came back and sat down again.

At the
beginning of the game, the other characters had bought armor and
weapons and potions and thief kits and such for their new characters.
Mr. Cool, being a smartass, wanted only one thing, and he
would not play unless he could have it: a box of Oreo cookies. They
had to be Oreos, and that was all he wanted. I decided,
"Cool"...what the hell, maybe some inter-universal trader
had visited some alternate earth and picked up a crate to sell in
backward realms. Oreo's equipped, he sallied forth, and refused to
share even one with any other character.

Into the
Dragon cave, bold as you please, without a trace of fear, Mr. Cool
strode. All the while he offered that he was staring directly into
the dragon's eyes, with an expression that was not fierce, or
frightened, tough or gentle. Simply bored. That was his
expression..the expression of a bored man, doing a boring job. He was
very particular about this.

He stood
facing the dragon, which was still nibbling at the shreds of
adventurer on it's mighty claws. The dragon looked at him. He looked
at the dragon.

Mr. Cool
requested that I roll to see what the reaction of the dragon would be
to this. After wiping out a small army of fierce adventurers, an
unarmed man in a crap robe, walks in looking bored, and faces the
dragon down. Many suggestions were offered, from the dragon
immediately incinerating him for insolence, to the dragon doubling
over from laughter. I made an impromptu chart and let the player roll
the reaction himself.

Confusion and
fear. It was reasonable, no sane character would do such a pointless
thing, so the only rational thing for the dragon to imagine was that
Mr. Cool must be hiding something. Perhaps he was a great wizard that
could fry dragons for lunch. Just how confused and afraid was the
dragon? On a roll of a D12, with twelve being abject terror, I rolled
a 12.

Mr.
Cool took out an Oreo cookie. He held it for a moment, regarding it.
Then he threw it at the dragon...or rather vaguely in the dragon's
direction. He didn't care if it hit anything.

But he did
care about how an abjectly terrified, sedentary, treasure-hoarding
dragon on a high-cholesterol diet of adventurer, who had just
recently over-exercised, would react.

The dice do
not lie. Amidst all the possibilities we hastily cobbled together,
the result, lowest in probability, was "Massive Fear-Induced
Heart Failure".

After
scooping up as much treasure as possible, and checking the dead
dragon's genitalia (female), he went into the expected egg chamber,
and after citing both Pern and agricultural science involving birds,
he impressed a hatching dragon. The newly hatched dragon pup, which,
now was convinced (and bonded for life) to the notion that "Mr.
Cool's" character was its mommy, was more than happy to fly him,
his vast haul of treasure, all of the experience for the adventure,
and the remaining Oreo Cookies, back to whatever....place....he
belonged in.

The
Man Who Actually Won

Dungeons and
Dragons is not a game anyone can ever 'win'. By it's nature, a Role
Playing Game, is never-ending. Every game is a 'slice of life' within
a given game universe...characters strive, fight, win the day, save
the world, and sometimes die, too. But the players of the game cannot
actually 'win', not like a game such as Monopoly, or Chess, Or
Go...in those games, at the end, because there IS an end, somebody
wins, and everybody else loses. There is no absolute goal in Dungeons
and Dragons...even in your favorite character dies, or becomes a god,
eventually they leave to play somewhere else...but the world you
crafted, waits for a different set of players, another day.

Let me tell
you about a High School friend of mine, in fact the very man who
taught me how to play D&D...Michael Pearce, the only man in the
world to actually WIN Dungeons and Dragons.

Michael is,
and was, a remarkable intellect, both incredibly shrewd, and
incredibly creative, and in a game of D&D, is astonishing, either
as a player, or as a Dungeon Master. Surprises were the normal
expectation, playing with Michael, so I was happy to have him a part
of a game I was running one day in 1978.

Now I had
just read the thoroughly brilliant Harlan Ellison book based on the
award winning script for the unutterably terrible television series
"The Starlost", and I was hopped up with excitement at the
idea of miles long ark spaceships with multitudinous encapsulated
biomes. "Silent Running" taken to the max, each biome ten
miles in diameter, each unique, hooked up like grapes to the central
stalk of a gargantuan star ship. Throw in rapid transport, a doomed
course path that must be solved to save the ship, and the fun of
having the characters not know they were on a starship inside a dome
at first, and there was sure to be plenty of fun for everyone.

Of course, my
favorite literature was science fiction, and the Golden Age was my
favorite sub-genera, so I had included artifacts from dozens of
favored stories in my game universe, from space pods ala 2001 to
Heinlein's multidimensional 'Foldbox' from his wonderful novel 'Glory Road'.

I should make
a note of how I create game universes. I do not just slap some prefab
modules together and run a game. I sit down and literally design a
universe...even if I am modelling something I have read by someone
else. It is never enough for me to use something as it is, I have to
make it mine. My game worlds are literal universes, all of them with
unique touches to the physical laws, biology, customs, technology,
peoples and every single aspect. I have books filled with universes
of my own creation, and one book that just describes the system I
have invented for cataloging alien physical laws! Simply put, I fancy
myself a 'Creatrix'...not a god or goddess...gods are like social
workers that administer universes...customers for universes...no, I
mean the being that actually MAKES the universes themselves...the
contractor that the gods call on. That's me. I try to be very
professional in my calling.

So my
starship ark was some 200 miles long, and I had mapped out every one
of the fifty, unique, 10-mile-wide spheres that housed a biome, an
artificial sky, animals, plants and the culture of one group of
people. I had worked out the systems of the ship, and its course, and
its correct course, how the semi-sapient computer tried to run
things, even how the controls on the pods worked...I liked to
challenge medieval characters to figure out spacecraft controls from
trial and effort...I used to make props for my players, that sort of
thing. All well and good.

The party of
brave adventurers had discovered, and come to terms with their
medieval village being inside a dome of metal, they had seen the
stars outside the windows in the main part of the ship, they had used
the direct brain-link educational machine to grasp what was needed to
be done, they had sussed the location of the control room so as to
save the ship, and at this crucial point, Michael got bored.

You don't
want a bored Michael Pearce in your game. Stuff happens. Stuff you
could not ever have hoped to prepare for, stuff that you have no
rules for.

While
everyone else had their characters race to the control room to steer
the ship away from the giant red star it was inexorably being driven
smack into by a programming fault, Mike's character was going the
opposite direction, looking for the shuttle craft bay. The assumption
was that he was going to have his character bail on everyone, and he
was being mocked a bit for such lack of party spirit. What no one
realized was the lack of concern he had for the whole adventure, or
the true extent of his ambition.

Now Michael
had made sure to take with him his favorite Foldbox, straight from
Heinlein, the ultimate accessory to any adventurer. Let me briefly
explain the Foldbox, for those unfamiliar with Heinlein.

A Foldbox
looks like a cube, eight inches on a side, perhaps nicely decorated,
perhaps plain, with a very elaborate knob to open it with. By
twisting the knob, the box unfolds, like a flower opening, all the
sides opening out from within. Open the lid, and stuff can be placed
inside the expanded box, and with a twist of the knob, it closes up,
and is utterly safe...nothing can destroy a Foldbox. But wait,
there's more! The Foldbox is a hyperdimensional device. Twist the
knob once, it unfolds, sure. Twist the same direction again, and the
box unfolds yet again. And again. And again. And Again.
As big as you want. You can store a caravan inside, easily. the
entire furnishings for a house. The house itself. Then, just twist
the knob the other way, and the box refolds itself, all the way back
to a light, easy to carry, totally massless, eight inch cube. Better
than any stupid 'bag of holding' that's for sure!

It was one of
the very few things I had ever put in a game that I had not changed
in any way. It was true to Heinlein, as best as I could make it. I
love Heinlein. Why would I change such a cool device?

Mike was
sealed in a space pod, the kind with manipulator arms, just outside
the warp-capable shuttlecraft it was stored inside, and he was
manipulating his Foldbox with the robot arms. Before him, out the pod
window, was the entirety of the 200 mile long generation ship that
was carrying the entire contents of a lost world, and which the other
players had just incidentally saved from certain doom. As if Mike cared.

Michael used
the Pod arm to continuously rotate the knob on the Foldbox. It kept
unfolding and unfolding, as one would expect. When the Foldbox was
400 miles on a side, and was still doubling in size at a disturbing
rate, I began to become worried. You see, as young as I was, I had
not learned the absolutely vital lesson that ALL artifacts in a game
must have defined limitations to their abilities. Heinlein did not
need such limits for a story where only certain reasonable things
would happen. But Dungeons and Dragons is a story that the players
make up, and anything.....ANYTHING....can happen, unless limits are
carefully, carefully set.

Now, the
Foldbox, as stated before, was defined as being massless. Otherwise,
it would be impossible to carry so much in it when it was refolded.
So, Michael simply, effortlessly slid the massless, 4 light-year wide
Foldbox around my entire 200 mile long generation ship, around the
other players characters inside the ship, the star they had all
nearly collided with, the entire planetary system that surrounded the
star, the cloud of comets that surrounded the stellar system of the
Red Giant, and a nearby companion star that Michael, for good
measure, insisted I roll for because it was an astronomically sound idea.

Then,
Michael's character, oblivious to the anger of the other characters
in the game, rotated the knob on the Foldbox the other
direction...for a goodly time....put his helmet back on, opened the
pod, and retrieved his little Foldbox. Placing it in his satchel, he
docked with the warp-capable shuttlecraft, and soared off into history.

I always play
honorably, and fairly. It's important. I gave Michael my maps. I gave
Michael my book. I gave Michael my artifact list, my list of NPC's,
my diagrams and props, and entire game universe. The other
players dutifully gave him their character sheets (except the wag
that had run to the shuttle bay himself, stolen a shuttle, and went
into warp before the box closed...swearing revenge), and since there
was no more game to play, no more world, no more characters, everyone
(except the guy fleeing in the shuttle) agreed that Michael had
indeed ... Won.

Doomsday
Acne

My
generation-starship game (The Man Who Actually Won)
inspired the rest of my gaming group at Sequoia High School to run a
number of science fiction based games, and for a while, that was all
I knew. I had drifted into my own little circle, involved with
science fiction (I had started a competing science fiction club and
we were obsessing over this brand new 'Star Wars' thing that was
coming out), so I was not doing as much D&D for a while as I had been.

One day, in
1979, one of the gaming regulars pulled me aside, and demanded that I
do something about the monster I had unleashed. It was all my fault,
and damnit, I had better correct the problem or there would be a
lynching after school, with me as guest of honor!

The problem
was Michael, and his little Foldbox.

Just after
the original Foldbox incident, Mike had grilled me about how the damn
artifact really worked, in every tiny detail. What would happen, for
instance, if he lifted the lid on the contracted, 8 inch version of
the box, and looked inside? What would he see? What would happen,
say, if he had a handy pair of tweezers....

I relied on
my knowledge of Golden Age science fiction to answer questions that
Heinlein never covered. I decided that the closest thing to the
Foldbox was Henry Kuttner's "Time Locker". Now "Time
Locker" was a story that involved a safe, which had been painted
inside with a hyperdimensional paint that not only opened a rift in
time, but did so by distorting the basic dimensions of
spacetime....which is pretty much why spacetime is called
'spacetime'. Looking into the dimensionally extended safe, one could
see miniatures of the things placed into it, and one could reach into
the distorted space to manipulate the things, for a time, anyway.
After a few moments, any object placed into the safe would gradually
become affected by the dimensional field, and begin to shrink and
fall into the space inside the safe, which was larger on the inside,
than on the outside.

I reasoned
that something similar would happen with a Foldbox, if one pried open
the lid, one would see all manner of objects, from houses to planets,
swimming inside it, and that if one were to drop something in, or
pull something out, it would take time for the object to itself fold,
or unfold, hyperdimensionally. I figured Mike wanted to drop things
in, or pull tools out, like using any 'bag of holding'. More
convenient. Yeah, right. It was Michael.

When I ran
the 'Judgement' game that supposedly would sort out whatever mess was
going on, I found the entire space fleets of several entire science
fiction universes arrayed in battle position, covering nearly half of
the game cosmos. From giant dreadnoughts to tiny fighters, the whole
of science fiction was all in league, all ready for a showdown.

Opposing this
innumerable multi-universe armada was a single, by comparison, tiny
ship. It was a perfect sphere, about 10 miles in diameter. It was
constructed of neutronium composite metals, and was solidly packed
with super-science machinery, under a shell miles thick. The only
moving intrinsic part, as Michael carefully explained to me, was the
robot pilot, which was a sapient electronic mind, roughly the size of
a shoebox. The machine brain had little wheels, which permitted it to
shuttle back and forth between two plugs, in a ten-foot long, 2
foot-high corridor. The corridor was itself located in the very
center of the ship. For safety. The rear plug was for recharging the
brain, as needed, and the forward plug was the direct interface to
the whole of the neutronium starship.

Michael had
apparently gone on a Foldbox orgy, scooping up any game he could get
into, scooping entire galaxies, into his massless gift from Heinlein.
Using the best super-science tools, he had briefly reached into the
open, miniaturized Foldbox, and played cosmic tinker. He had smelted
Jupiter-sized worlds down, made piles of entire metal-rich star
systems, and netted all of the black holes he could collect. Some
universes had been melted down whole, others simply picked apart for
anything good. He made use of every bit of technology he could pluck
with tweezers from countless worlds. He put stars on lathes and
hammered laws of physics on hypercosmic anvils. All to construct his
ultimate starship. Perfect, nothing to break, one moving part,
armored in miles-thick neutronium it was utterly invincible, unique
in the multiverse.

But he had
not been content to merely be safe. The great sphere was covered in
weapons...stellar core accelerators, ravening ray emitters that could
release the power of an entire stored galaxy as a single brilliant
beam, a rack of mechanized, bolted-on armatures that could rapidly
discharge the contents of hundreds of thousands of Foldboxes in
sequence, each Foldbox containing one or more black holes of various
grades. Singularity machine guns, essentially. Every little idea
anyone, including myself, had ever come up with for a game, was taken
to any logical extreme that the rules permitted. The lack of defined
limits and boundaries had come home. I was indeed to blame.

On one side
of a ravaged universe was Michael's ultimate weapon, on the other, a
billion, billion starships of every kind and form, all realizing just
how helpless they were, before that one, horrific machine. Michael
wanted total surrender. Every game and gamer must belong to him
alone, and all D&D in our school from now on would be at his
blessing only...and we all suspected that he was tired of the game,
and would insist that it all stop. No more gaming. What a bastard!

The problem
was, being the absolute nerdiest nerds in all of the Silicon Valley
of that time, we all played honor-bound to follow the rules. He knew
that. He was a nerd too, of the highest caliber.

The defending
side called me to conference. This was unfair! I had just ignorantly
given away the means of all our destruction to a madman! It just was
not fair! There had to be compensation! Such a fuss, such a big
deal...but then, it was high school, and everyone is insane at that
age. So it mattered bigtime.

I agreed, but
Michael objected. He offered that he had done everything according to
our mutually agreed house rules, that nothing he had done was
anything any other player could not have done, he just thought of it
first. Therefore, too bad!

After much
acrimony, on all sides, a compromise was reached. The Alliance Of
Starships would get an appropriate weapon or tool to give them a fair
chance, my pick, and in compensation for that, I would give Michael
an equivalent weapon too. Since Mike's ultimate machine was already
impervious and unbeatable, the defenders agreed that it would be no
real difference in any event. I reached for my stack of special index
cards, each of which had upon it an illustrated and fully described
unique creation of mine. They were my best prizes. Unfortunately for
everyone involved, I was a really sick puppy back then.

The defending
Alliance got another science fiction homage, in this case, the tiny
can of time-spray from Harry Harrison's infamous science fiction
parody book "Star Smashers Of The Galaxy Rangers". The can
could literally spray time, and its use was such that when activated,
it would spray the half of the universe it was pointed at backwards
in time to Event Zero....the total mass of that universe half being
compressed, only to explode, creating the Big Bang itself. Handy for
universes that have no official explanation of their 'Big Bang' yet.
For those that have 'Big Bangs', anyway.

The card that
Michael drew from my private deck was original. It was the product of
a teenage imagination, and most of all, a teenage sense of humor.

The Acne 2000.

The Acne 2000
was a roughly football sized organic hyperdimensional weapon. The
fleshy ovoid was kept inactive only by how it was
housed....within a fish tank filled to the brim with a solution of
Clearasil and other facial ointments. Covering the Acne 2000 were
countless glowing, pulsing pimples of doom, and it floated in its
tank like a pustule-covered oceanic mine.

Once lifted
from the Clearasil solution, and exposed, the device was armed.
Picking just one of the pulsing pimples detonated the weapon, with
horrendous results. An infinite amount of flowing pus would
immediately spew from the dimensional pore that would open up, after
a brief hyper-acne reaction. The pus, spewing from an infinite hell
of filth, would fill the entire universe end to end, chock-a-block
with putrefaction, before the secondary reaction reached critical
mass. The entire universe, welling under a neverending flow of
schmutz, would itself swell in multiple dimensions, and burst,
filling any other nearby universes, which themselves would drown and
burst, and so on, ad-infinitum, until there was nothing extant
anywhere, anywhen, in any game world, except white, gooey, smelly
pimple sauce.

On one side,
the neutronium ship, and standing on a magnatomic gangplank,
suspended in a low-gee force bubble, stood not Michael's character,
but supposedly Michael himself, in person, in the game. He held the
fish closely, its deadly contends burbling inside.

On the other
side a billion, billion starships, dreadnoughts, spacefaring dragons
in pressure suits, spelljammer galleons manned by wizards, and mobile
moons mounted with plasma cannons. The Alliance Of Starships, and
leading them all, one lone player, standing suited in an open
airlock, holding a small spray-can filled with Time itself.

Now, it was a
Western, and this was high noon in space.

Michael
lifted the Acne 2000 from its thick, slippery goo, and a lone
spaceman lifted his can and aimed in the general direction of his enemy.

It all came
down to a roll of initiative. The higher number would press, or
squeeze, first.

It was agreed
that the missing mass of the universe, if only half of it had gone
back in time to create the Big Bang, must have come from somewhere
else, somewhere with a lot of mass to spare. As Michael and his ship
fell backwards in time, he frantically popped and squeezed and
picked. Now you now what Event Zero was composed of.

The
Saint Of Dice

I have played
a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, and related, games in my life. Rolling
dice are an intrinsic part of such games, because they allow unusual
things to happen, unusual results that surprise and amaze. Dice also
give people the illusion of control over Fate...dice are random, yet
people often feel like they are able to 'control' the probabilities,
in a kind of real magick, some unexplained ability. When highly
improbable events with dice occur, it is easy to believe such
nonsense. Or perhaps we humans can affect probability...I will let
you be the judge, for yourself.

One time,
during my days as a paid, professional DM, I had been running a free
game for some people I was involved with at the time, and the brother
of the person I was most involved with at the time came up to me and
made a rather incredible statement.

His friend
was visiting, had heard of what fame I had back in those days, and
wanted to meet me...and by the way, this friend could ALWAYS roll
within one number of any target on a 20 sided die. Without
fail. On any die. Any time.

Sheah, my
ass! Still, since the fellow was visiting, and since it really would
not take any time to see for myself, and since he was a big fan of
mine, I agreed to put up with whatever farce would be tossed to me.

The first
five or six rolls, each on a different die from my personal
collection were all perfect and exact. The value '20', time after
time. Then I borrowed the dice collection of an observing friend,
doubting my own dice, despite the fact that I had painted them myself
(you had to in those days) and knew my own dice inside and out (I
have an enormous collection of polyhedral dice). The next five or six
rolled I called at random....just picking numbers out of the blue.
Whether it was an 18, or a 3, or a 12, or 20 again....this young man
always, and without fail, on any die I gave him, (so long as it was a
twenty-sided die, he could not do it on any other die) he could roll
within one number. When I called 18, as I remember, he rolled 17, for
instance. He never missed, not even once, and I must have tested him
several dozen times. I wanted more, but he was getting bored,
besides, I had run out of fresh, new d20's to use. We used every d20
anyone had. I would not repeat using the same die, trying to see if
somehow the dice were rigged.

He did not
know how he did this trick. He just noticed, one day, that he could
do it. He was not that amazed by it anymore. He had been doing it for
several years. Adults could not care less, or refused to even bother
to look. I was almost so skeptical myself, that I nearly shunned him
as well. I am glad I did not, in retrospect.

To this day I
have no explanation whatsoever for what I saw. I tested the lads
claim as carefully as I could, given the situation, and there was no
shortage of witnesses from every angle. He did not palm the die, or
do anything odd....several times I asked him to simply hold out his
hand, palm up, where I deposited a d20, and had him just roll the die
off of his palm, without closing his fingers. Just let the die fall
off and hit the table. It made no difference.

I have no
idea what ever became of the boy, but I will always remember whatever
it was that he could do.

A little side
bit of human psychology can be seen here...the One-In-A-Million
Die Roll above, that so impressed me was actually
less incredible that what this lad could do. Statistically it
is highly unlikely for my Stephen to roll six consecutive
zeroes on 20 sided dice, but it is virtually impossible for
that young man to have been able to roll any number of targets as he
did. Yet, because of the strong emotions, and tremendous catharsis of
Stephen's roll, I remember it as being the more impressive.

I offer that
what we see as astonishing is as much a matter of our emotional
excitement over it, as the thing itself.

Night
Of The Living Characters

I had a
great, imaginative group of players when I was in college, back at
San Francisco State University in the early 80's. These players were
among the best I ever played with, not only because they were fair
and even-tempered, all around good sports, and very, very bright and
clever, but especially because they were damn good role-players. They
really got into their characters, and to an extent, during the course
of play, almost became them. They had speech mannerisms, body
language, even unique facial expressions which they performed while
playing at the table. It was a supreme gaming experience, because
they really put their hearts into the story, into the game, and most
of all, into their characters. It was almost like dice-controlled
improvisational theater!

Now one night
was very special, almost magical. The dice were singing, the rolls
were impressive, and our adventure was cosmic in scope. Indeed, being
cosmic was the focus of this particular adventure, in that the plot
had diverged from any expected storyline, as the player characters
made use of some extremely high-tech and high-magical devices that
they had come across to begin exploring beyond the boundaries of
their game universe.

You see, when
I ran my games, I operated from my own set of six hand-written and
illustrated books which attempted to describe not just one universe,
but all possible universes. I had fleshed out many universes of my
own design, all with unique physics and laws, so that there would be
the feeling of infinite adventure in my campaigns. These players had
finally breached the limits of their world, and I was squirming in my
seat with joy at the thought of all this prior work being used, of
the wonder I imagined my players would feel as they found that,
unlike other GM's, I was prepared to offer them...infinity! They
could romp through any cosmos, and enjoy true adventuring freedom.

However, I
was not prepared for what these especially clever players decided to
do. They sought nothing less than Enlightenment.

After some
adventuring and many exciting situations, the characters had become
aware of who and what they actually were: characters, in a game,
played by some college students on a backwater world in a mediocre
universe. I thought this was interesting in itself, the idea of
players now playing characters that understood they were characters
being run by players in a game. Very cosmic stuff, and loaded with
mystical import, and suchlike; but this was not enough. Oh no. Not
for my players.

The
characters decided they would use their newfound tools to travel the
multiverse, not for treasure, not for glory, but instead, to meet
their players. The players, deeply into role-playing their
characters, wanted to travel to earth, to our cosmos, and meet the
people who were playing them.

This was too
challenging to pass up. The air was charged with emotion, and
excitement was running very high. I always play my games fairly, and
I could see no reason within the logic of my game system that this
could not be allowed, so...

The party
decided to steer their Mutiversal Mover to Earth.

The
characters managed to make landing, not far from the college, from
SFSU. They followed their newly developed, Enlightened senses through
a strange, extremely low-magic world of stop signs, automobiles, and
paved roads. They found the college at last, and then the dorms,
where they sensed their players lived. They entered the lobby,
getting stares from students. They managed to figure out how to work
the elevator, and proceeded up to the top floor, and found themselves
in a hallway. Following their mystic connections they made their way
to the closed door of the communal kitchen, and waited outside.

My players
were breathless. I was breathless. In the rapture of a well played,
high-emotion role-playing session, we could all just feel those
characters outside the door, waiting to dare to enter. The tension
was unbearable. It felt utterly, eerily real, as though in some
strange way we had broken some basic law of the nature of reality,
and somehow, these fictions had actually been brought into existence,
and we dared to imagine, to feel, to believe, just for a
moment, that these games were really windows into other universes,
that mysticism and magick were real, and that just outside the
kitchen, a miracle was taking place!

In hushed
tones, a player stated that his character would make a fist and lightly...

At that exact
moment an insistant knocking -pounded- at the kitchen door.

As one, we
all literally leapt up in our seats.

The poor
student who entered had no idea of why there were seven people in the
kitchen laughing hysterically while looking deathly frightened at the
same time.

The
Ass That Saved The Future

The best
tabletop RPG sessions are not, I have found, usually filled with high
powered characters. Above a certain level, chacters become godlike,
and after that, well, things either become pointless, or silly. So in
reality, becoming super powerful is death to an RPG character.
Generally, you have to retire them

Which is why
I so love low level characters, especially when they face serious
danger and manage to overcome it. Using a Godly Slashing Blade of
Slaughter (+25) is boooring....but using a can opener to save a
world...now that is fantastic stuff there, the true stuff of legend.

Let me tell
you how one of my worlds was saved...by a lowly, fat, bare tush.

As you know,
I play my RPG universes for keeps...what the players do becomes a
permanent change to my universes. And by universes, I do mean the
plural, I have many. One, however, was my first fully worked out
universe, and despite some serious immaturities in the design, well,
I have a soft spot for it.

The Gorbald
Universe is one of my signature pocket-class universes, with planets
only 4000 miles in diameter, galaxies of only 100 stars, and only 42
galaxies in the entire universe. I had bothered to plot all the
stars, planetary systems and so forth, and I had worked out a truly
astonishing level of detail for it all spanning four filled blank
books....I put so work into it.

One planet
began it all, Pelenor, with its three moons, eight continents, and
many islands, a pelagic planet of high magic and swords and
sorcery...and a GART stop. Galactic Area Rapid Transport. A bus stop
to the stars. It also had ruins with abandoned starships, the planet
was once a base for an alien race long extinct. It was now of
interest to the Ayar, a species of sapient avian hunters who are
extremely keen on propriety...be there on time, follow the rituals,
or we destroy your world and several others we saw on the way in.

Long story
short, my players, several only 2nd level...such as the starship
engineer from Pentolamerkan played by one of my spouses, Sandra, had
ended up acting the role of official representitives for my favorite
backwater planet, and they needed to sign a trade agreement for the
world with the Ayar, and they needed to do this at a specific time,
and at a specific place, and they also needed a really decent
greeting gift, and even Goddess could not help if they mucked it up.

After many
struggles they finally managed to get to a point where the goal was
within sight, but one of my players, apparently as student of my
famous DuBois Dubois, decided to double cross everyone. You see,
there was a marvelous ancient starship filled with goodies that they
had come across on the way to this meeting, and it had become their
only means of transport, and it was worth a fortune, and ultimately,
Cheron, a half-feline thief, decided that nobody would miss one
little planet.

The rest of
the party, down to one starship and nothing else, had voted to give
the fancy starship to the Ayar, and take the 'bus' back to
Pentolamerkan, after gathering the vast reward they would get from
Lord Bertrand Arantaurus, the emperor of Pelenor at the time. The
starship would be a superior gift to the Ayar, and would assure a
bright future for everyone concerned...as well as the survival of my
favorite world...with such a gift, even if everything else went
wrong, the Ayar would surely forgive.

Cheron did
not care about this...selling the ancient ship would set her up as
queen of her own planet. She was neutral evil, and well, the rest of
HER party had outlived their usefulness to her important goals.

So, she
decided that to avoid any arguments, she would off them all and take
the ship.

Everyone was
trapped in the starboard airlock. Everyone except Cheron, of course,
who was happily working the pressure controls from the comfort of a
comfy chair in the control room. Don't bother to ask how this
situation came about, suffice it to say that sometimes things like
this happen, especially if one player has it in for everyone else and
is clever.

So there they
are, hours left to save the day, almost to the goal, and one player
betrays the party and they are stuck in the rapidly depressurizing
airlock of a beautiful ancient starship, and it is getting harder to
breath. They have only a few, weak tools, including a universal
screwdriver..useless on the doors by the way...and no way to get out.
It is doom city. Bye by Pelenor, bye bye party, happy giggling
half-cat thief on the speakers. Nasty.

Now in space
adventures, one big issue is the conditions of space...which by and
large generally means what exactly will vacuum do to a body,
especially your body, in some...unfortunate circumstance. Let me tell
you, as I told them.

Initial
exposure to vacuum is not fatal. First the small capillaries burst,
creating a bloody-looking but mostly harmless mess around the eyes,
nose, ears and mouth. After about 30 seconds to a full minute, a
person will become unconcious. During all of this time the flesh
becomes very puffy and swollen, but that is about it. After about
half an hour, long after death (the brain dies at about four minutes,
the body follows soon after) the corpse will swell up like a balloon,
but will not burst. Eventually the body loses gas over time, and you
have a freeze-dried, vacuum preserved Taste-E-Corpse.

So, Vacuum
does NOT make people explode, like you see in certain, rather poorly
researched, sci-fi movies.

Which is all
vital information, if you are slowly being killed inside the airlock
of an ancient alien ship armed only with a screwdriver, and not, say,
a Godly Slashing Blade of Slaughter (+25).

My Sandi's
solution was ingenious.

She asked me
all about the airlock, of course, as any good player would, and the
thing that held her interest was ultimately the place the air was
going...given enough time, her engineer character could figure a way
to open the doors by getting at the wiring, but they clearly did not
have that kind of time...they had minutes at best. Air was being
sucked out, stop that, and they would have enough time.

The air was
being evacuated into storage tanks deep within the ship through a
large, grated tube that opened into the ceiling of the huge ancient
airlock. The tube was about half a meter around, perhaps a bit less,
so they could not crawl out that way. Nothing they had on them could
possibly block an opening that large...they had removed the grating,
of course, and shoved all their clothing up the tube, but the
powerful compressors had simply sucked the clothing away.

Naked, dying
clowly in the airlock, the party was a great source of amusment for
the cattish Cheron, who was having a field day mocking them, watching
them on a viewscreen. Time was almost up.

Sandra asked
one of the other players, who had a tall, beefy warrior character, to
lift her small but pudgy engineer up to the vent, bottom up. This
surpized everyone, but the situation was desperate. He complied, and
her engineer was placed ass first against the tube.

SPLUCK! MFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Naked, the
engineer's rear end made a perfect, self-sealing cork and totally
stopped the depressurization. In terrible pain, as the flesh of her
ass distending in what became a total vacuum, the brave engineer
barked instructions to the rest of the party as to how to use her
tools to gain access to the wiring, and ultimately, to open the inner
door.

The rest of
the party ran to the control room, and after a brief gunbattle,
Cheron surrendered on the promise she would not be killed. The
airlock control was adjusted, and Sandi's engineer fell to the
ground, quite alive, but resembling a baboon from the rear.

They made it
to the meeting with the Ayar. The Ayar were beyond pleased with the
ship, with the meeting, and with how gallantly a certain engineer
managed to deal with them despite an obvious limp.

Pelenor was
saved, Cheron was left to spend time in the prison system of
Arantaurus, and everyone else went home on the GART star-bus a very
wealthy and successful set of adventurers.

Of course,
one of these adventurers, the true hero of the adventure, chose to
stand up, holding the hand rail, the whole trip back.